Adi M. Treasurywala, President

After a PhD in Synthetic Organic Chemistry and a fulfilling career in Pharmaceuticals in the US and Canada over a span of two and a half decades, Dr. Adi Treasurywala joined the University of Toronto Innovations Foundation in 2001. Adi rose through the ranks from a bench scientist to the Head of Research at Allelix Biopharmaceuticals and eventually to a senior position in Business Development at Pfizer in the US. The five years spent as the COO of UTIF expanded his horizons to include deals and startups in IT/Telecom, Physical Sciences and an expanded view of Life Sciences which included human health, agricultural sciences, diagnostics and many other areas. The commonality in all of these areas from the business perspective, and the obvious need for industry-experienced people in the area of translating pure research into commercial activities led Adi to eventually start his own business in 2005. ArrowCan Partners is a unique service model that helps connect the best researchers in Canada with the best industry receptors globally. It has proved itself as a valuable tool to its industry clients in many different areas from materials sciences to software and beyond.

Adi is a consummate networker and has connected more than four hundred people to one another in vetted, value-added, non-obvious connections last year alone and continues to be a source of appropriate connections in many different fields today. Adi has served on several Boards including the Board of Directors of the Toronto Biotechnology Initiative (TBI), and that of Youth Science Ontario and he has served as the CEO of six companies both in the life sciences and non-life sciences areas. Adi currently serves on the award adjudication committee of several Canadian innovation-promoting organizations. In 2009, Adi was awarded the TBI Volunteer of the Year award in acknowledgment of his many volunteer activities with different organizations. He has a passion for helping promising young people make their career choices and plan their individual paths through various forms of mentorship. Watching their careers unfold has become a prominent motivator for him over the years. Throughout his career, Adi has retained a strong commitment to contributing to the success of the teams with which he has been associated.

Mary-Rose Treasurywala, Partner

With a Master’s degree in Sociology and a specialization in Survey Research Mary-Rose brings a keen knowledge of the market research side of industry to ArrowCan Partners. After an honors BA from the University of Toronto she completed her graduate work at the University of British Columbia. Mary-Rose is a truly international individual having lived for two years in Zurich Switzerland and for more than a decade in various parts of the US (Princeton NJ, Albany NY, Philadelphia PA). Her professional experience includes a highly responsible position at Bell Canada in Montreal where, amongst other studies, she participated in a project to determine the telecommunication needs of disabled people and created a directory of available telecommunication aids. In each place she lived Mary-Rose volunteered in different capacities – helping in a halfway house, patterning a person with cerebral palsy, raising money for teens through a thrift shop, cooking food for homeless shelters, assisting in post op at a hospital. In 2008 Mary-Rose was awarded the City of Mississauga Civic Award of Recognition for her volunteer work. Mary-Rose has found time despite her busy schedule to raise a remarkable daughter. At ArrowCan, Mary-Rose is responsible for university relations and all market research activities.

Paul Gill, Partner

Paul is a self-taught web designer who has been instrumental in producing the first version of ArrowCan’s website. He completed his MD at McMaster University in 2010 after having completed an exceptional MS degree at the University of Toronto through the department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathobiology where he elucidated aspects of the mechanisms by which sonic hedgehog signaling leads to kidney development. Paul’s BSc was in a cooperative education- based program in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, at McMaster University, For his bachelor’s thesis project, Paul worked on the crystallization of a bifunctional kinase protein believed to be important for antimicrobial resistance. Through the cooperative education program Paul was able to work on constructing a S. coelicolor cDNA library at the Antimicrobial Research Centre at McMaster University. Paul also spent a year working in the field of breast cancer stems, studying the clonality of such cells in causing cancer, and spent two years isolating a medicinal component of a plant useful in destroying intestinal worms.